


What Branches Grow

by bonehandledknife (ladywinter), Primarybufferpanel (ArwenLune)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: ALL THE WARNINGS ALL OF THEM I AM NOT KIDDING BONEHANDLEDKNIFE IS EVIL, Furiosa lives, Gen, Joe is horrible, Max lives, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The escape goes wrong, the wives do not survive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 08:44:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6231997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladywinter/pseuds/bonehandledknife, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenLune/pseuds/Primarybufferpanel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow<br/>Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,<br/>You cannot say, or guess, for you know only<br/>A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,<br/>And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,<br/>And the dry stone no sound of water. <br/>—Excerpt from The Wasteland by TS Elliot<br/></i>
</p><p>What if the hold wasn't aired out properly...</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Branches Grow

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this kinkmeme prompt](https://madmaxkink.dreamwidth.org/1730.html?thread=1657026#cmt1657026)  
>  _Max is standing there on a dune eating his two-headed lizard when he hears his car start, and finds a desperate, exhausted, one-armed woman in the drivers seat of the Interceptor. He tries to drag her out, but can't manage, she's strong and grimly, silently frantic. A moment later he understands why - there's a patrol headed their way.  
>  Congratulations Max, you've gotten caught up in Furiosa's escape. _
> 
> **Once again, please head the warnings. The start of this is very grim as obviously Bad Things Happened for Furiosa to be that desperate.**

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow  
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only  
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,  
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,  
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only  
There is shadow under this red rock,  
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),  
And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

— [The Wasteland](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176735) by TS Elliot —   


  
  


What if the hold wasn't aired out properly... 

* * *

 

It all ended when the Dag sneezed; she'd tried to hold it in, eyes wide, and it was muffled. But patrol had been walking close enough to hear and it was enough. The women were dragged out, and Furiosa, checking the engines for the night, had started backing away.

They'd cried to her for help and she didn't; she didn’t help them, thinking to give herself some leeway, some escape hatch. 

In the end this became yet another regret because it didn't matter, Immortan Joe punished her for it anyway, putting her in the cages in the Blood Shed from where she was made to watch as they drained out the unpregnant wives before her eyes.

Maybe, if they'd worked together, they would have overwhelmed the patrol. Maybe if they'd guarded each others backs, Furiosa would have room to fight their way out.  _ Maybe,  _ she thinks, as she slammed herself against the bars, as the three sets of eyes closed finally and didn't open again and were cut down.

(she doesn't say their names even in her head, but it didn't matter, she screams when they go and then was tazed until she fell quiet)

And finally it was her turn, as she was swung upsidedown and woozy, muscles twitching from electricity, a sharp pain in at her collar. It felt like she’d been hooked up for a long time, and to many warboys, and when she next looked up the Ace was smiling at her, except it was only a smile because that's what a frown looks like when down is up.

He looks like his world had switched down and up. Furiosa would wonder if he was glad to be given her blood except that...

Ace's forehead is bandaged, but he looks otherwise unhurt, glancing every so often at the movement of the Organic Mechanic as he tends to this Boy or that.

Furiosa numbly follows the path of his eyes and saw him watching as three warboys approach, and start talking to the man as he worked, backs blocking their view of the Mechanic.

Blocking the Mechanic’s view of them.

And Ace nods, and then pulls out a small set of bolt cutters, and starts working at her chains. When she fell, he almost let her slip, but he clutches at her with tight fingers and a quiet curse.

He carries her away to the door, and hooks the small cutters into her belt. Hands her off to Morsov while he starts walking quickly in the other direction.

Morsov runs. He runs her down several levels until he slows, and when he does another pair of hands catches her, and she can't see who because her sights gone soggy with the jouncing. Morsov presses a canteen into the other Warboys hands and his shoulder crashes against the stone of the hallway, wobbly.

She sees that he's panting, and she sees him stagger off and then she closes her eyes because she’s dizzy and trying to keep her sick down. 

"Drink some, Boss." 

She can't, even as she's passed along with little bits of help pressed into her hands, a blanket, some rations, a bit of wire.

She knows that they're going to get into trouble for this. Knows that from how fast they're running that they would be seen and remembered. Knows that there's no place in the Citadel they could hide, and no place in the near Wastes that they wouldn't be recognized, or run down. Knows that this is a death sentence for them.

The last one she's passed to helps settle her onto a bike. Another crewmember runs up with her metal arm and helps her into it. They quickly stowe her gifts into the side baskets, and press their forehead to hers, brief. "Go quick, Boss, I think there'll be alarm soon." They dash off.

She goes, because there's no way she could turn back when they've already sacrificed this for her.

But she is only two hours out when the music rises. She tries to think about guzzoline and speed and visibility but the deaths both past and future thrash her heart and she just knows that she needs to get  _ away _ . So she fangs it, turning off-road, and thinks,  _ perhaps the Rough Riders _ .

A plume of dirt kicks up at her speed and she hopes it it would be mistaken for a cloud. Maybe she’ll be lucky.

(She doesn’t really think so. Her luck ran out when she was thirteen.)

Furiosa knows from past patrols that there were some hills if she takes a detour to the canyons, enough roughage in the terrain to perhaps hide a single biker, right before the land turns flat, a smooth funnel between two swathes of highground, a cradle for sandstorms. She’s skirting Buzzard territory but she has to risk what she can and hope maybe they’ll vulture onto the bigger kills and not after a single rider.

She thinks this, but before the thought could even settle, spikes rise out of the sand.

* * *

Max stares at the long swath of Wasteland, wondering where to head to next. There was nothing to the (west?) of him but canyons and salt.  _ Maybe south _ ?

There was a rustle behind him, skittering close.

He stomps. And reflexively flings the bit of meat into his hand. Then into his mouth. Seems young, he thinks of the lizard, more easily chewable than the last one he caught at any rate.

He blames the chewing for almost not registering the body that slid behind the wheel of his car.

Max whips around and stares and pale eyes stare back, large and shocky. Their shoulder moves and from long experience he knows that they’re trying to start the car without taking their eyes off him and Max dashes around and slams into the drivers-side to get this guy out. Something metal almost takes his head off but he’d found a good purchase on the side of the vehicle to lever out of the way and just dove in to slide arms around the thin waist and  _ haul _ .

But the guy’s barnacled himself in somehow and as Max glances around he sees that the something metal has clamped to the wheel and the metal is attached to the stump of an arm and the arm is attached to.

_ Huh. _

Not a guy. 

She sees the realization lit into his eyes and she struggles harder, but Max just wedges down further himself and refuses to budge. It’s still not her car.  _ His _ .

He grunts it without realising. " _ Mine _ ."

She moves  _ with _ his weight and then tilts her hips and it almost gets his arm caught between the metal arm and her grip, which would be pretty awful considering she could snap it in half or dislocate it by levering it just right, if she knows how.

Max is pretty sure she knows how.

Honestly he’s not had to struggle this long against an opponent for ages, he usually takes them out fast or they take him out fast. To spend so long trying for advantage means they’re pretty well matched. He thinks that in another time, a storied time, there would have been a pretty intense piece of music set to their struggle and he can imagine it clearly.

_...wait. _

He’s not imagining it.  _ There’s drumming? _

Max shoves forward, drops his weight hard across her thighs to keep her vaguely in place, and pushes his head up past the dashboard. There’s a small fleet of cars and at the back of the convoy a truck carrying… a man on a timpani?

He must have mumbled it or something because the woman grinds out, “Patrol.”

“Errrrh?” Max watches but they are coming up fast and he  _ knows  _ he doesn't have time to get her out. Getting away is more important right now, he can deal with her later, so he shoves himself upright and into the seat trying to push her bodily into the passenger side, “ _ Move _ !”

She stares him down while trying to heave him off her lap and he looks back at her, not budging, because he knows that if she’d known how to start his car, she would have driven off in the time it took for him to rush to the driver’s seat from his place near the car’s nose.

The metal hand releases with a hiss, and she slides hurriedly into the passenger’s seat, a knife appearing from somewhere, as she wedges herself against the door. There appears to be a bag slung at her back, but Max doesn’t spend long looking because he reaches down for the switch, hooking it to catch in place instead of letting it swing back, and then peels them out.

She’s tapping the knife idly against the metal of her arm and the noise is clawing at his brain like the music that chases them. Max glares at her from the side of his eye and she glares back, watching him twitch.

Then she rakes the edge across the metal in a way that made it  _ screech _ . 

Max jerks hard at the sound but manages to fling his hand out before her fingers catch at the wheel.

_ Do you *want* me to drive into them?  _ Max shakes his head at her roughly, and shoves her hand away.

The woman snatches up the dagger that she’d let go of to lunge for the wheel and settled uneasily back down again. She glances at the rearview and seems to flinch at what she sees.

Max watches this out of the corner of his eye; he can spare some attention now that he isn’t under immediate attack. 

The woman looks ragged, but recent ragged not Wasteland ragged. The meat on her arms means she’d seen better times, but the dark circles under her eyes and the deadness in them... says to Max ‘ _ broken _ ’. 

He knows this from the look of the eyes he catches in the rearview. He knows this from the ghosts he sees. 

Max wonders idly if this woman is a ghost taken new form, one that pushes back at him. But he’s pretty sure he’d never met her before.

The patrol gains on them, and the drumming picks up in volume.

One of the lead bikes peels away and comes up on them fast and the woman hisses at it and scrambles for her pack. Max grabs a gun from his sideboard as she whips out a piece herself and holds it on her as she ignores him and checks the bullets. One left. 

She nods to herself and shoves a little out the window and shoots.

And Max watches the bike spin out, a body falling from it. 

_ Huh _ .

He watches as she pushes the gun back into the bag and sling it over her shoulders again, watching him warily all the while. Then how she glances at how more cars are coming up fast on their tail. Max thinks a bit, but not long, as he reverses the grip on the gun and then shakes it at her.

The woman’s eyes dart down at the piece, then back up at him; and reaches out slow.

He twitches as her fingers curl around the handle, but that's fine because she twitches too, and edges back into her corner. And Max drives, but it’s not fast enough, and they both know it.

She turns to lean out the car again.

They've made it away. He can hardly believe it but she managed to take out the drivers, slow down their pursuit while they switched people, and then the Buzzards decided the limping pursuit vehicles were much  more interesting than the lone car. 

He can see her hands shake around the gun, eyes reddened and dry from lack of water, from food or otherwise. The sun is setting and he should find a safe place to settle. Along the base of the mountain ridge maybe, the canyons themselves would be too full of traps and ambushes. But maybe enough place to leave a person and enough shadows that they’d limp off into them without too much fuss.

He rolls the car to a stop by a likely looking pile. Searches himself for likely words.

“Mmmm, the people chasing, you took ‘em out.” He points out. Then reaches across her for the door handle.

She flinches away from him badly but he just opens the door and she slams towards the center divider before she can tumble out. 

Max finds himself suffocated and scrambles back himself into his seat before she can lash out. Her flesh hand lands on his thigh and there’s a strange look to her face that makes Max uneasy and he quickly tugs that leg away, tucked up into a half ball, knee awkward to his chest, brace catching against the wheel, and tries to kick her out.

Doesn’t much work, even with the opened door. The woman just latches onto metal with her metal arm, her flesh hand now at the collar of his jacket, and won't be budged. They struggle for long minutes, grimly silent, until eventually they both subside, panting and frustrated. Stare at each other. 

“T-there is a— a Green Place,” she finally says. It’s maybe the first words she’d said since they’ve met. Max can hear the capitals in her voice, and maybe he’s a little curious because he’d been crisscrossing the Wasteland looking for… something, he doesn’t know what, and he hasn’t seen anything like the color green for a good long while.

The closest, perhaps, being the bits in her eyes, but they are a murky green, if that.

“Green doesn’t exist,” Max mutters, finding energy to shove at her again, “would’ve seen it.”

“I’ve s-seen it,” She growls in denial and pulls him along with her so that every shove moves him out of the car as well, “born there.”

Max scoffs, and presses a large palm against her face as she tries to tighten her hold. “Mphft… back where I picked you up?” She reaches around his neck and he slams a hand in between her metal arm and his neck even though it makes his fingers scream.

“Was  _ taken _ .” She twists them until she turns on top and lunges for the wheel but Max just braces against her middle and shoves her in the opposite direction,  _ hard _ , her grip tight, still, on his jacket and he's jerked along with her.

They tumble right out of the car and hitting the ground slams the air out of both of them, but Max works to slam his weight on top and pin her arms and legs because he knows that if he gives her an inch, she’ll steal his car right out from under him.

He stares down at her while she jerks and twitches, perhaps at being pinned, perhaps just because she's as feral as he is. It subsides slowly. He can't tell if she's exhausted or saving her energy or a little of both. 

"Where is it," he grinds finally, staring down at her. 

She looks back, her gaze steadying with a kind of resolve. Says nothing. 

He can't really blame her. If he had knowledge like that, he wouldn't be sharing it either. 

Her breath sounds laboured with the weight of him pressing down on her. He shifts a little, and becomes aware of how intimately he is pressed against her. Her expression flickers through fear and fury and then goes to cold contempt. He tries not to be bothered by what she expects of him. The Wasteland is a special kind of harsh on women. 

"I'll, mm, I'll find it on my own."

"They'll n-never let you near," she wheezes, and he finds himself shifting up a little to let her breathe. "Not without me."

"Mm."

He pushes up and climbs into the passenger side behind him, quickly moving over to the driver side. As expected she's scrambled into the passenger seat before he's got the car started. 

"Try to, hmm, touch the wheel, get away with my car, and I'll shoot you," he grunts. 

She looks as if she finds that a reasonable deal. 

"Touch me again," she says then, softly, her voice hoarse, "and learn to live without hands."

He has little doubt that she can back up her threat. 

"Right."

He drives. 

 

Eventually, she sleeps. Well, dozes. She's curled up with her back to the passenger door, her knees pulled up to her chest, a knife still clenched in her hand. Every motion from him, every change in the road or turn of the wheel, brings her up. Sometimes with a sharp gasp, sometimes only the flickering of her eyelids, awake but not wanting to let him know. 

He's only now noticing how scraped up and bruised she is, the dried blood on the side of her head, the thick bands of dark bruising just above her elbows and around her wrist. There's an ugly red mark on the back of her neck that he thinks might be teeth.

She gets twitchy when he looks at her outright, so he takes these things in in glances. 

 

There's a point where he needs sleep, while she is well rested. 

_ Shoulda thought that through _ , he thinks ruefully. He could stop the car to take a nap with her awake next to him, so he'll at least stay in the drivers seat, but there's no shelter here, it would be better to keep moving. And if she has nothing to do but waiting for him to wake up, he knows he won't sleep. 

He could let her drive, and take the risk that she'll dump him out, but he's surprised to find he's not that worried about it anymore. 

When he really can't keep going without risking a crash, he lets the Interceptor roll to a stop. 

"You drive," he grunts at her. 

She blinks at him. Nods slowly. 

Max looks back, then indicates with a hand motion that she should get out and walk around, so he can move over to the passenger seat. She tilts her head, and he can see the scenario she plays out in her head - he'll duck back into his seat and as soon as she's clear of the car he'll be off. Then he can tell she considers the alternative, which is squashing past each other in the cramped interior of the car. He remembers how hard she'd flinched at being touched, and he sees her recoil from the thought. 

She reaches out and takes his gun from the dashboard mount. It's the gun she'd used earlier to shoot at their pursuit; her own weapon has no bullets left. He nods slowly, understanding she means to keep him under shot while she walks around. 

Fair enough, really. 

She opens her door and slowly, painfully moves out of the seat, her eyes and gun trained on him, and she limps around the back of the car. He wonders if he would have gone around front, but it's more exposed when you have to go around the doors, and would leave her more open to being run over. To his surprise, the thought of trying it doesn't even occur to him. When she is behind the car, he moves across to the passenger seat. 

She looks surprised when she arrives at the driver side door, and he wonders if her expression mirrors his own, both of them surprised to find themselves doing this. 

Trusting. 

When she's got the car started, she puts the gun back into the dashboard mount. 

Max sleeps. 

 

He doesn't know how it happens, would never have thought it could. But somehow, in the weeks it takes to skirt the wall of mountains, they grow accustomed to each other. She actually sleeps for more than 20 minutes at a time, and he stops twitching for the wheel when she drives. (mostly. She has a lead foot worse than his, and she tends to drive like the car is five times the size it is)

They even learn, under attack from raiders, to switch seats mid-drive in the cramped Interceptor. He pushes up and hovers awkwardly around the steering wheel, foot ready next to the accelerator, and she scoots out of the seat behind him. The first time she has her teeth gritted because she can barely stand the proximity, but it works.

If they stop for the night, one of them curls up in the back with their only blanket while the other keeps watch from the roof. He gets as familiar with her nightmares, with the wild, disoriented look when she wakes up from them, as he is with his own. 

They hardly speak. Whole days pass with no more than a few gestures and grunts. Sometimes he forgets that she can, until they meet traders and she's suddenly producing whole sentences, speaking with easy confidence and authority. He thinks maybe she used to be an Imperator. 

Being that person for trade exhausts her. She disappears into her own head for days after.

 

One night they're so far from anywhere that when he settles to sleep, he grunts and gestures at the front seat. "Might— ah, might as well," he says. Out here there's really no point to sitting on the roof in the freezing cold. 

She shakes her head, curt, frowning at the change. He's still not sure what happened to her, is probably better off not knowing, but he knows routine makes everything easier for her, patterns in behaviour that make her feel more at ease. Sometimes any change in his behaviour is cause for setting her on high alert, sending her right back into sitting with her back to the door with her hand on a weapon, watching his hands warily. Sometimes he spends days moving a little more slowly, making sure he doesn't pass behind her.

He shrugs, and wraps the blanket around himself. Her silhouette is outlined against the night sky as she settles on the cooling hood of the car.

 

The sound of a car door carefully being opened wakes him, though he doesn't move. Through his eyelashes he sees her breath forming little clouds, and when she moves into the front seat, he can hear her breath shake from the cold. 

"Hey," he murmurs. He doesn't know her name. They've been travelling the Wastes together for at least a moon phase. He's known her long enough for her hair to grow out into a spikey mess, and suddenly it feels like he ought to know her name. 

When she looks back at him he lifts the edge of the blanket, opening the warm cave he's created around himself to the cold night air. 

The starlight outside silhouettes her, he can't see her expression, but he thinks he can probably guess at what it is. He grunts and lowers the blanket, gets comfortable again, and lets himself sink back into sleep. 

Some time later he feels her creep into the space behind him, slow and furtive like she's expecting— like she's doing something dangerous. Her stealth would probably have served more purpose if she hadn't been so cold that the moment she shifts against him, he gasps. 

She makes a low little sound, an apology perhaps, and he reaches up to lift the blanket away from his back and over her body. 

"Mm, 's ok," he murmurs when she hesitates, and after a few long moments she lets out a shivery breath and presses herself up against his back, a long line of hard, sinewy muscle and frigid skin. By the time she's no longer shivering, he's asleep again. 

He would have expected her to be an uneasy sleeper, twitchy and uncomfortable with sharing space so closely, only driven to it by the cold. But the next morning she is still there pressed up behind him, breathing quietly. She's not touching him more than needed, her arms are curled around her own torso, like she's used to this, sleeping self contained, but close enough for sharing warmth. He stays like he is as long as he can, knowing how rare it is for her to sleep properly. 

He has no idea when he began caring about that. 

 

It happens more often after that, and he learns to pretend he doesn't notice, since that clearly makes it easier for her. It reminds him of a feral cat, unable to openly accept something even when it's been offered. She sneaks into the space behind him when he sleeps, and at some point this stops waking him up.

One time he wakes up turned toward her with his arm around her, and her body rigid, as if she's frozen between fleeing him or fighting him. He mumbles an apology and turns his back toward her, and listens to her relax by slow degrees. 

 

They don't find her green place. Or rather, they find the place she's sure it should have been, went right past it the first time until she said they went too far, circled around and backtracked a little and tried finding different approaches, different landmarks, but they kept coming up to an area that... all it is is an acidic marshland with a few dead trees. Crows. A land of scavengers and ruined things, much like the rest of the Wasteland. They skirt it, but there's nothing else, She spends the next three days sitting silently in the passenger seat, eyes fixed on nothing, as he drives and drives. It's unsettling. They usually have a good-natured and mostly silent argument about who gets to drive. Neither of them are good passengers. 

"I thought— I thought it'd still be there," she says on the third day, quietly, and he nearly yanks them into a sanddrift, it startles him so much. 

"Mm."

"That's where I was going to take the girls," she adds after a long silence. 

"The girls?"

"The Immortan's 'wives'," she says, with a kind of acid in her voice he hasn't heard from her yet. "We were gonna— but."

_ But something went wrong. _

She doesn't say anything more, but that night she doesn't wait until he's asleep to curl up against his back, just slides into the space and pushes her face against the back of his neck. He likes it more than he thinks he should. 

If he'd known there was no green place he might have tried harder to dump her, that first day. But by now it no longer matters; he's grown used to her presence, maybe even come to like it. 

 

Neither of them says it, but they each know they're thinking it.  _ What now? _

They keep moving.

Sometimes they come upon raiders or the raiders run into them. But ambushes become easier to avoid, with two pairs of eyes watching; become easier to survive, with more than one person fighting.

Occasionally they meet up with tribes, and it still startles him every time when she gathers enough of herself to cow them into trades or safe passage. Sometimes he takes the lead and looms until their opposition part before them or he  _ makes _ them part with fists and bullets. But such incidents were rarer than before, when he’d had to go it alone.

They find a ruined old city and spend almost a month skirting around it in circles, darting into its confines for short expeditions. The locals learn that trying to rob them isn't worth the trouble it gets them, but venturing into the cty is still dangerous. They find a few things previous scavengers hadn't seen the worth of; main one being a book of maps.

"There was so much green," she whispers in wonder. "I thought the elders exaggerated."

"And blue," Max said. He thought he remembered that, an endless expanse of blue. It was all gone now. 

They stare at the map in silence. 

"Wonder if this is still green," the woman says finally, fingers tracing a green island at the top of the map. "If the sea is gone, maybe we can go there."

Max knows that the salt flats to the West are endless, but somehow that became in his head that they are  _ all  _ endless, and it is strange to think that there might be new land reachable up North. A string of what used to be islands in a salt plane that does not look, from the map, too deep or craggy to cross. 

It might not be green anymore; it is hard to imagine that it would be. But it'll be new. 

 

It takes them a while to gather supplies. It's a few weeks later that they make it to the salt planes in the North. She is driving, and she lets the car roll to a stop on a dune, looking out over the endless, gently sloping emptiness.  

"I'm Furiosa," she says suddenly. 

They've been travelling the Wasteland for months. There's never anybody else around, so in his head she's always just been 'her' or 'the woman'. 

_ Furiosa _ . 

It suits her, somehow. 

"Mm. Max," he answers. It comes out easier than he expected; nothing at all like it’s being ripped from him. Nothing at all like bleeding.

Instead it’s entirely like the wide feeling of the sky above them, sharp and bright and endless.

They glance at each other, exchanging a grin that comes easy too, and fang it North. 

Papua. It even  _ sounds  _ green. 


End file.
